Alejandro Amenabar
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7.0 Thesis (1996) 7.2 The Others (2001) 6.5 The Sea Inside (2004) 7.0 Agora (2009) 6.0 Regression (2015) | Links: |
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Alejandro Amenabar (1972), born in Chile but raised in Spain since he was one year old, debuted with a number of shorts before his first horror film,
Thesis (1996), co-written with Mateo Gil.
Amenabar then directed the sci-fi movie Abre Los Ojos (1997), which Hollywood remade as Vanilla Sky (2001), directed by Cameron Crowe. Los Otros/ The Others (2001), another English-language film, is a ghost movie from the point of view of the ghosts. The suspense and horror are elicited not by gorey scenes and visual effects but simply by the twists in the plot. Anne tells her brother that she has seen a boy, Victor, in the house. She also tells her mother who ignores her. But then one day Grace hears noises and searches in vain the house. She punishes Anne for repeating stubbornly that there are other people living in the house: Victor, his parents, and an elderly blind woman. Grace shows Bertha an album of odd photographs of people sitting in chairs and Bertha explains that those are photographs of dead people, an old custom. Bertha tells Grace that the entire island was evacuated after an an outbreak of tuberculosis in 1891 during which many perished. Every now and then Anne tells Nicholas that their mother is mad. Nicholas resents that. Grace is a very religious woman and wants her children to study the Bible. When Anne insists that there are people in the house, Grace punishes her by making her memorize the Bible. Bertha thinks that Grace is too tough with Anne and tries to console Anne, also admitting that she too has seen the ghosts. Then one night Grace cannot pretend anymore: a chandelier dances, the piano plays by itself, someone locks a door, and Grace can see that the servants are outside. Only ghosts could have done it. Grace asks Anne for forgiveness. Grace now believes Anne: there's a family haunting the mansion, the "intruders". We hear Bertha and Edmund plotting against her, and we realize that Edmund is raking leaves to cover three gravestones in the backyard. Grace decides to run to the village and asks for the priest. Grace quickly loses her trail in the fog but suddenly a man emerges from the fog and it is her husband Charles. Grace hugs him crying but Charles doesn't seem happy to see her. Grace cooks lunch for him but Charles simply lies in bed without speaking. The following day Grace dresses up Anne in the white dress for the first communion. She leaves Anne for a few minutes and, when she comes back, she finds her mutated into an old witch. Grace attacks the witch but the witch turns immediately into Anne and Grace is terrified to realize that she has hurt her daughter. Charles confronts her about something that happened in the past when all the servants left. We realize that Grace has hurt Anne before, and that's why Anne thinks that her mother has gone mad. Charles is cold and distant. He tells Grace that he has to return to the front and leaves, despite the fact that the war has already ended. The next morning the children wake up screaming: there is daylight in their room, which could kill them. Someone has stolen all the curtains of the house. Grace is furious and suspects the three servants. The servants almost admit it when the try to explain to Grace that daylight will not hurt the children anymore. Grace points a gun at them and kicks them out. As they leave, we hear them plotting against Grace. Grace searches the house for the curtains and stumbles into a photograph of dead people taken in 1891: it's a photograph of the three servants. Meanwhile, Anne, fed up with her mother's madness, decides to elope from the window. Nicholas follows her. The children walk in the fog and stumble into the gravestones, that the servants have cleared of all the dead leaves: the names on the gravestones are the names of the servants, all dead in 1891. Grace hears the children screaming and runs outside to defend them from the servants. Grace locks all the doors of the house to keep the servants out. Bertha, always calm and respectful, tries in vain to explain something to Grace: that the living and the dead have to learn to coexist. Grace hears that someone is talking to her children and runs upstairs. What she finds is Victor's family sitting around the table and listening to a blind old woman (a medium) who is trying to evoke a ghost. We learn that Grace has killed her children, smothering them with pillows, and then shot herself to death. Grace gets furious hearing this and disrupts their ceremony and suddenly we see the family and the medium but not Grace and not the children: Grace and the children are the ghosts in the house. The family is trying to get rid of the ghosts who are haunting the mansion, the ghosts being Grace and her children. The real family has had enough: they decide to move out. While they are packing their luggage outside, Victor stares at the window from where Grace and the children are watching the scene. The "intruders" are gone but we see a sign "for sale" hung outside. Bertha calmly tells Grace that they will have to deal with other intruders in the future. Grace tells her children that this is their house and they will not leave. He then turned to a realistic story, Mar Adentro/ The Sea Inside (2004). His first English-language film was Agora (2009), nonetheless filmed in Spain (in fact, the most expensive Spanish-made film until then). Regression (2015)
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